Blender How To: Roof Creation Workflow & Creating a Japanese Style Roof (MESH ONLY)

hey everyone in today's video we are going to go through the process of creating a roof and really understanding a type of roof workflow that we can use in blender the workflow we'll be using can be applied to many other types of roofs and it will ensure we get clean geometry and the ability to continue modifying our asset at a later stage through a fairly non-destructive method the example we'll be using is a japanese styled roof just a few disclaimers before we get into anything this video will only show you how to create the core roof mesh so we will not be designing those shapes on the corners of the roof that you see in most japanese roof designs we are only focusing on the actual tiling of the roof and we are not going to cover textures and materials two reasons for that one texture material creation in this particular case will require diving into another piece of software which would not be fair on a lot of people who just use blender and secondly texture and material creation is a whole other topic of its own it really isn't that comparable to 3d modelling no matter what some people tell you but i will do the toils on material creation in the future so don't fret i might show an example of applying some materials to our roof at the end of the video but it won't be an in-depth explanation but if you want to text your roof there are many websites online where you can download textures to do this or if you're already knowledgeable with texture creation then you can create your own either using photoshop substance design or even using texture baking methods i just want to make the point that this video covers general roof workflow and we are happening to use a japanese style roof as the example so let's just keep things simple and if people want to see me take this design process further then i can so before you create any 3d model it is good to understand what you are actually creating so here is my reference image so theory is a vital part of the process you should have reference images and also some background knowledge of the materials and the general design of the asset you are trying to build so in this case people will just call this a japanese style roof because well that's the easiest way to explain it but it isn't called that this particular roof style is called a koara roof and i really hope i'm pronouncing that correctly so if you were to type in koara roof into google you will find images and search results specific to what you are trying to create as i said before this workflow can be used to create many types of roofs and you are not just limited to a koara roof style you can do like a roman style for example or any other curved roof styles using this workflow so workflow is an extremely important part of 3d design because if you create a nice modular and non-destructive system for the asset you are designing then you can use the same system to create other similar assets so just keep that in mind another thing i want to state before we get started this video is not aimed at beginners we are going to cover some higher level concepts of 3d modeling and although i will make it easy to follow along it's really meant more for intermediate to advanced use as a blender so i strongly recommend you follow my blender beginner tutorial series before you start watching any video like this one right so let's get started first of all let's delete everything on our scene click a to select everything and then delete it and now let's create a cylinder rotate it on the x-axis by 90 degrees and do not scale the cylinder just keep it as it is now let's create an array modifier for it and put 2 in the x-axis now let's create a plane that sits in the middle of these cylinders with the plane created move it on the x-axis and type two to bring it this way by two meters and i'll just move it uniformly between the cylinders now let's optimize the geometry a bit for the cylinders delete the faces at the bottom here below where the plane connects so to do this easily let's just go into front orthographic view and also go to wireframe mode with face select on and let's just grab our bottom faces here back into solid mode and let's also grab the bottom face um sorry the back face around here delete the faces and there we go lastly here we want to just raise the edges of our plane here if you look at our reference image you will see that the ends are a bit more raised with the plane selected create six loop cuts one two three four five six and then just confirm the selection and then select the edges here on the corners and with proportional editing mode turned on as well as snapping mode with edge snapping enabled we basically want to bring it up to the next edge here we want to make sure that the plane in the middle here remains flat so it's going to front orthographic view i'm just going to bring down the proportional editing circle so something like this and we just want to snap it just to the next edge like that it's not completely uniform with the edge but um the snapping mode just gives us a bit more of a uniform placement because we want it roughly around that area anyway right now i'm going to select the end faces here and add a bevel with control b and i'm just going to scroll up on the mouse wheel four times one two three four and it's just going to give us a nice smooth ridge so let's do that and let's also dissolve these edges here as we don't really need them you should now have a nice curving shape to the plane before we continue i just want to look at our reference image again you can also see that there is a cylindrical shape that runs on the seams here between the plane and the cylinder tiling so let's create this i find that the easiest way to do this is to select the edges right on the ends here and then separate them into their own mesh so as you can see lines here let's just turn off the snapping mode the lines here are their own separate mesh now and now let's convert these lines into curves and now that they're curves let's come down to the object data properties here under geometry change the depth to 0.01 now let's convert this new shape back to a mesh and what we can do now is come to the edges here alt click the front part and then click f just to fill in the gaps here right this is where the magic comes in now let's join all of these shapes together and now let's create an array and set the count to 10 although you can do whatever number you want it just depends how long you want the roof to be but this is fine and also remember to turn on merge and let's create another array but this time i want to offset it by one on the y-axis and then zero out the x-axis and again let's set the count to 10. so you can probably understand how this workflow is starting to give us a roof shape again let's turn on the merge but if we go back to our reference image you can see that there is actually a bit of an offset for each tile here well we can actually easily mimic this in blender thanks to our array modifiers here come to the z-axis of our second array that we created and put in 0.03 and that will create the offset that we want for the plane tiles here we are just going to select the innermost edges just here not these end parts and we're just going to drag them down a little bit let's turn off proportional editing first just drag them down a little bit so coming back to our reference image here you will see that the tiles in the middle have some thickness so let's grab all of the edges on the front and extrude them down on the z-axis until the gaps get filled just over here another thing i want to do is mark the edge of our flat plane here as sharp so alt click and then mark as sharp and then make a loop cut and just slide it to the end this is basically going to help us with the shading calculations later on when we start to smooth out the roof at the end of the video because if we didn't have any sharp edges the shading will just think that everything is rounded which is not the case at all let's do the same trick for the main curve tiles up here so i'll click these marker sharp loop cut and bring it in i just want to line it up with this loop cut here something like that next i'm going to change around the geometry for our front end cap here we need to do this because if we were to apply the array modifiers now we are going to have all of these large circles appearing all over the place so there are two parts to this first in edit mode and face select let's inset this face with i second in front orthographic view drag a selection box over the middle part here so we want to grab all the bottom half faces of this circle which will also grab the larger circle in the middle here which is what we want and now delete those faces so what this has done is it still retains our geometry but only in the places where we need it so after we apply the array modifiers we can just rebuild the front end caps here and we won't have to worry about it being duplicated across next i'm just going to sync up these small cylindrical shapes with each other i also want to do the same with the edges of our plane tiling because at the moment you can see they're a bit offset so let's select the edges of our middle tiling here so select and select turn on proportional editing mode and then rotate on the x-axis just until it starts to line up but that's basically what you want so it's kind of moved up the tiling a little bit here and it's also linked up these cylindrical shapes so the roof is coming along very nicely now the next part requires us to apply our array modifiers so make sure that you are happy with the length and the height of your roof it would be a good idea to make a backup save file now so you can always revert back if you need to so i'm just going to do that i'll come to save as and i'll just call this a quart roof 2. before we apply the array modifiers though we should make some vertex groups that we can easily reference geometry later on if we need to so come to the vertex group section here go into edit mode and let's just create some vertex groups i want to create one for the caps here we'll just call it caps assign and i always like to deselect and then select again just to make sure that it's um registered correctly and then deselect everything and then let's do the same for our cylinders here and let's do cylinders assign deselect select let's do the same for our main tiling here and you can name these vertex groups whatever you want there's no hard and fast rule for it and now let's select the middle tiling here and we'll just create a vertex group for this so i'll just call it middle tiling front or something like that i'm just going to save that so confused as to why we bothered making these vertex groups let me show you how they come in handy right let's apply our array modifiers so what if now you want to select all of the front tiling parts here are you just going to come through and do alt and then alt again alt again etc across the entire roof uh well no you're not so this is where vertex groups are useful so the thing is array modifiers remember vertex groups and we'll apply the duplicate geometry from the array to our vertex groups so for example if i come to the vertex groups and if i was to click select on the middle tiling front you can see it's actually selected well all of it across the entire roof and if you want to make any changes to it now turn off proportional editing mode and there you go so this is very handy with that out of the way let's move on to the next step which is constructing the front end caps here so first let's create a circle and do not scale it we just want to line it up with the front tiling here so i'm going to rotate on the x-axis by 90 degrees just bring it to the front here on the y-axis somewhere around there and then in edit mode vertex select mode i'm just going to come into my front view f to fill in the face um actually no we want top of a graphic view for this and now extrude the faces outwards just a little bit something like that before we continue modifying this i'm just going to hide the circle quickly uh of course we don't need these uh caps here for our front parts so let's just go through and select these slightly tedious this part but there's no other way to do it and this just keeps our geometry as clean as possible let's just delete those faces now and then let's bring back our circle right and for these faces up here which we extruded let's select them all and then extrude out a little bit along the normals just like that and now with the front cap selected here we're just gonna extrude the face inwards a bit like that now let's apply an array modifier just so we can apply it to all the other parts here put in the same counts that we did before for our race and for this we're going to want to use a constant offset as the relative offset won't help us this time around from doing this before i think a good value was about 4.01 meters in the uh not sorry not the z axis the x-axis yeah that works so yeah 4.01 meters in the x-axis we'll line everything up just fine now apply the array modifier we also need to add the front caps for the middle tiling here as you can see in our reference image this part here so let's go into edit mode select the bottom edges of the front part of our middle tiling here and separate it into its own mesh we will add this to an array in a moment and now whilst in orthographic view i'm just going to edit mode as well and select everything with a let's start strewn this down on the z-axis but we also need to make sure that we're conforming to the shape with the cylinders so when we extrude again just scale on the x-axis just to make it line up could be a little bit tedious but the results will be worth it and that looks alright and now with face select mode on select the bottom and the top faces and extrude them out a little bit but not too much we want the front caps here for our main tiling to stick out more than these parts um let's also mark the edges of the extrusion as sharp so what i mean is these parts here again same reason as before mark sharp this is all for the shading calculation just bring the loop cuts to the end something like that now let's add an array to that array 10 and same as before we did 4.01 uh oh not in the relative offset though constant offset 4.01 there we go now apply the array modifier i also want to delete the flat tiling at the end of the roof here so that both ends are symmetrical so let's select each of these tiles with l and then if we come in a bit more this cylindrical detail here let's just click l on that and then just delete the faces and actually want to do the same here so let's just click l uh yeah so we should have actually done that count as 9 not 10. that's fine easily fixed we are now going to start adding the main curvature to our roof that you see with a lot of old japanese architecture we are going to do this using a lattice and a lattice modifier but first i want to set the origin of our roof here to the center of mass surface so that our small orange dot which you can probably see here probably very hard to make out it will just move it into the middle of our roof so that when we create the lattice we'll be able to scale it uniformly with our roof it's not mandatory but it just makes everything a bit more symmetrical so origin to center mass surface and then do shift and s cursor to active there we go and now let's create our lattice on the creation menu come here lattice and now let's scale that up just make it just over the bounds so now i'm going to scale and move the lattice around so it fits nicely outside of the bounds of the roof now let's increase the resolution of the lattice come to the lattice object data properties here and change the u resolution to 5 and the v resolution to 4. this just gives us some more control points for our deforming of the roof because that's what the lattice is going to be used for and you'll see how that works in a moment now let's select the roof under the modifiers panel let's apply a lattice modifier and then select our lattice as the object so just to show you quickly if i select the lattice and go into edit mode if i was to now grab a vertices and move it you can see it takes the roof along with it and this is how we're going to get our curvature but first let's just select everything and rotate it on the x-axis by 30 just so we have the roof on an angle which we actually want if you want it to be steeper then do a different angle and now let's start deforming come into the lattice here edit mode and first of all and you can do this in any way you like but my method is grab the middle vertices here and then move them down a little bit another thing i forgot for the roof and the front tining we did here ctrl j we want to join that before we start doing anything um and the same with a circle ctrl j we want all of this to be joined otherwise the lattice is going to move the roof away from the separate meshes here so back to lattice modifier just check that all the middle vertices are selected now let's move this down just a little bit so you can now see now that we've joined everything together it's all deforming nicely with each other now i'm going to select the most middle vertices and move them down very slightly now i'll grab the second top horizontal lines here move them down very slightly and grab the second to bottom horizontal lines here again just making sure i've selected everything at the bottom here move them down very slightly grab the top vertices here move them up just a little bit and then grab the edges of the lattice here and then shift drag and then move them up just a little bit probably a little bit more than that actually and then what i'm going to do is i'm just going to grab the front vertices the lattice here and i'm just going to come into a right orthographic view for this but what we want to do is we want to rotate them on the x-axis so that the end caps face a bit more forward but we don't want to do it too much because we don't want to deform the tiling here to an extreme level so let's just rotate gently something like that so that they're facing a bit more forward now let's hide our lattice with h and see what everything looks like so i think that looks pretty good and again you can do whatever shape you want here you could make it a lot more steeper here or or to be honest if you didn't want any curvature you could just not even use the lattice it's uh whatever you are going for and if you feel like anything looks too sharp then you can come back into the lattice and just adjust the resolution so like if i to change this to 8 you can see it just gets a lot smoother so from this point there is a variety of things you could do you could say that the geometry is finished now so you can go off and start working on the texturing process or perhaps you didn't want any curvature so you could just delete the lattice and have the whole roof being straight or perhaps you want to cut into this roof to make corners and that is what i'm now going to show you so for everything to be perfectly modular we need to add here to one rule this roof needs to be cut at a 45 degree angle so it can perfectly fit with duplicated versions of it to form a complete roof and you will see what that is important later also before we move on now be a good time to apply our lattice modifier if you are happy with the changes just avoid deleting the lattice just in case you want to use it again in the future so we can just keep our lattice hidden for now so let's begin let's set the origin of our roof to the center of mass surface again and then shift an s cursor to active now create a plane scale it up so we can see it properly and let's just move it up as well and the first thing to note do not scale this plane on any specific axis only scale it uniformly this plane must be a uniform square all times where each of its measurements match this will help us adhere to that 45 degree rule right so now let's go into edit mode on the plane face select mode and now let's right click on the top face and select poke faces so this has now given us four 45 degree angle cuts on our plane here let's delete the bottom part here and let's take these faces and let's just extrude them up and let's also come to the object properties here viewport display and let's just display our new shape here as wire just so we can see through it and now let's scale the shape around so it fits around our roof but also make sure that there is a slight gap down here so something like that just want a bit of a gap there and again scale uniformly these measurements need to match let's also take our shape and just make sure that it is moved down into the roof like that and now with the roof selected create a boolean modifier and assign the new shape we made as the object for the boolean and if you're happy with the cut just apply our boolean modifier so what have we just done well we've basically used our new shape to cut into the geometry of our roof here and we are using a 45 degree cut which means that if we were to duplicate this roof and rotate it on a 90 degree angle it should match up quite nicely but before we do that let's just set the transform pivot point up here to 3d cursor and now select the boolean box and set the origin to geometry and then shift and s cursor to active and now in top of a graphic view just so you can see it's a bit better if i was to duplicate this roof with control c and control v and then rotate on the z axis by 90 degrees you can see that it's lined up quite nicely if you zoom in you may notice there's still a slight bit of a mismatch normally this is because of the lattice modifier if you didn't use a lattice and any curvature then this would line up perfectly these mismatches aren't really an issue for a lot of uh asian roof architecture because with a lot of the architecture especially japanese architecture you normally have a seam or another shape that runs down here alongside the seam so this would get covered up so let's now duplicate our roof another two times to complete the shape and i'm just going to hide the boolean box here so just to give you an example of what i mean by covering these seams if i was to just create a cube for example make sure to change the pivot point back to bounding box i can scale this up rotate the z axis type 45 to put on a 45 degree angle and let's just bring this up a bit more on the local axis by the way you don't have to copy what i'm doing this is just to give you an example extrude that down and then bring that down just like that let's bring this down i'll just use proportional editing yeah it's not a great example but this is what i mean by you normally get shapes that cover up the seams with a lot of japanese architecture and if i was just to come back to 3d cursor on the transform pivot point control c control v rotate 90 degrees rotate 90 degrees rotate 90 degrees you can even add a cube in the middle here that's just an example of what you can do and as you can see the seams are completely cut off they are not visible and then in terms of materials and uv mapping that isn't too hard to do all of these shapes should already have some decent uvs at least for a basic material for example if i was just create two materials and again you don't have to follow what i'm doing here this is just an example but if i just create a material called roof the material called caps you know something like that and then i'm just going to use some materials i downloaded off for substance source and i'm also going to use a node wrangler add-on for blender to get these textures into blender a bit faster so with the roof shading i'm gonna do i think it's ctrl shift and t with the node wrangler add-on let's select clay and there you go you can see the material applying now quite nicely and then what i'm going to do just quickly is come into material preview and we're going to just assign these circular caps at the end here to our caps material and then back into shading caps ctrl shift t so i'm just using a sewer plate material which i don't advise you do it's quite weird material to use for a japanese temple but it's close enough to what i want you may also need to do some uv unwrapping here so if you come into uv editing this is actually quite easy to do for a lot of similar shapes like this with them selected you can just do u and reset and then you've just got all of them as a similar shape and there you go you may also want to do the same thing with these caps here again a little bit tedious but um you could actually just do a vertex group for this as well which would speed up your workflow but again this i'm just doing this for a showcase mainly apply the caps you reset it looks a bit strange but but you get the point anyway so then what you can do is we can just delete these other roofs and then we can take our roof here and then do the same trick again and let's give our other shapes here the same material as the roof why not and just a quick trick if you come and select your roof select the roof material here and then hold down the alt button and left click drag from this material icon here and just drag it on to our shapes here if you watch my blender tutorial series then you may know that already and then i can just grab these and then just do like a q projection unwrap anyway i went off on a tangent there so that's basically you know an example of the kind of results you can get one other thing we need to fix which is really really quick if you zoom in you will see that the geometry is still a bit harsh you can see the lines here um because it's still using a flat shading method if you click the roof in fact click all the roofs and do shade smooth there we go and then zoom in those lines disappear and you remember when i said to mark the edges as sharp well the reason for that is so that the shading works better on the edges because if we didn't do this you would have had some pretty strange results from the shade smooth function and yeah that's basically it uh japanese koara roof uh do what you want with it put it into a game a film a render whatever you want and you can also adjust the geometry uh you can change around the materials again material creation is another topic of its own and it would require us leaving blender which is why i didn't go through it on this video as this video is solely about blender roof workflow and just the the tiling geometry but i will do a separate tour series on that in the future and then you can apply that knowledge to any 3d model you like there are also plenty of textures online if you want to use them on your roof model so in summary we have learnt how to construct a koara roof but more importantly we have worked through a solid workflow on creating any type of roof really with the process we have gone through you can use that to create roman roofs korean chinese architecture uh and even fancy styled roofs actually like i don't know elven roofs you can make something from lord of the rings who knows i hope this video has helped you not just understand roof building and blender but has also armed you with a bit of knowledge of the tools that blender offers so that you can apply it to your other designs and i always hate saying this part but if you enjoyed the video and if you would like to see more content like this feel free to subscribe i'm also on instagram i will link that in the description and i have a lot of planned for the near future for youtube and other things so definitely stay tuned for that anyway thank you for listening and i will see you in the next video

Channel: JoshA3D

Views: 18,603

Keywords: 3D, Roof, Workflow, Japan, Blender, 3D Modelling, 3D Design, Design, Kawara, Architecture, Game development, Techniques, Modifiers, Geometry, Mesh

Id: ZUF74Qy0AJg

Length: 40min 21sec (2421 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020